The Royal Tenenbaums

Director: Wes Anderson, Wes Anderson, Wes Anderson, Wes Anderson

2001 / 110min / 35mm

This sprawling double LP of a movie and fully-drawn dream of a Gotham family as imagined by a Texas-raised New Yorker obsessive revealed young Wes Anderson’s full mastery of the ensemble drama. Gene Hackman stars as the truculent, tone deaf patriarch of a family of overachievers fallen on hard times. Arriving on-screen as it did in the months after 9/11 (and screening at the New York Film Festival mere weeks after), Tenenbaums was a New York City love-letter warmly received, already on its way to being one of a handful of 21st century films that might actually be called “generation-defining.”